blue monster israel

Just stum­bled across this photo from July, 2007. The Blue Mons­ter made it to the SAP offi­ces in Ra’anana, Israel. Rock on.
I’ve not been pushing The Blue Mons­ter much in the last year. I’ve been busy with other things, and besi­des, like Microsoft’s Steve Clay­ton told me a while back, “It already has a life of its own, so there’s no need to…“
That being said, every now and then I’ll come across someone in the Mic­ro­soft ecosys­tem, either via email, Twit­ter or in per­son, who’ll tell me a funny story about it e.g. like how they were in somebody’s office on the other side of the pla­net, and there they saw it, han­ging on the wall. Stuff like that makes my day. And it’s been hap­pe­ning quite a lot recently, for rea­sons unbek­nownst to me. Which I sup­pose is why I’m wri­ting about it now…
In retros­pect, over two years since it made its debut, I’m quite relie­ved it never got offi­cially sanc­tio­ned by the Mic­ro­soft mar­ke­ting machine. “We’re Mic­ro­soft! We GET The Blue Mons­ter! We’re cool!!!!” That would’ve gone down like a lead balloon.
My spies tell me that inside Mic­ro­soft, The Blue Mons­ter is pretty divi­sive. Some peo­ple really reso­nate with it, a lot of peo­ple go, “Who the hell autho­ri­zed this?!! This isn’t part of the bran­ding!!!!” I con­si­der them friends of mine, but I don’t work for Mic­ro­soft, nor are they currently clients of mine. So I’ll let them sort that one out for them­sel­ves. Heh.
I never envi­sio­ned it as part of “The Brand”. To me it was just a car­toon that arti­cu­la­ted that demo­nic, crea­tive pas­sion, that sense of PURPOSE that ALL com­pa­nies need to arti­cu­late, Mic­ro­soft or other­wise, soft­ware or other­wise, if they wish to remain inte­res­ting, if they wish to thrive long-term.
It’s not roc­ket science. Which is why it works.
[Link: The ori­gi­nal Blue Mons­ter blog post.]